Walker uses abstraction to characterize complex reality

In a culture seething with moving images, painting that asks us to take it seriously must acknowledge its own inertia. New York painter and former Bay Area resident Sarah Walker understands this, to judge by her involving new work at Gregory Lind Gallery.

Most painters of Walker's generation realize that they have little or no hope of finding a fixed, describable detail of reality that might evoke the complexity of our historical moment. But abstraction - ongoing for nearly a century - and current technology for repatterning information have opened new pictorial possibilities.

Walker apparently exploits some of them in complex compositions that appear to involve computer-aided design at some stage.

Whatever source images may lie behind her paintings, she blurs the trail by layering and interlacing details, often by scraping areas down, as in the arresting "Cone of Rays" (2008). Here, as in other pieces in the show, we get an impression of something emerging or something dissolving, of ambiguities peculiar to remote surveillance.

Walker's paintings deliberately suggest snapshots of a process. But rather than try to evoke movement, they work on mobilizing the viewer's imagination, perhaps the only medium agile enough to comprehend the dovetailing of forces and facts that shapes the world. Her compositional methods also allow her to display her adventurous eye for color.

Because they succeed by getting imagination going, Walker's paintings, whether on paper or panel, work best at modest scale. Her one large piece here tries to engulf the viewer, almost in the manner of Julie Mehretu, whose work frequently suffers or dies by inflation.

The size of Walker's largest piece undermines it. It seems to refer the mind's eye directly to the big, busy screens depicted in futuristic movies such as "Minority Report" and "DéjÀ Vu." Modest dimensions, on the other hand - "Cone of Rays" is on the large side, at about 2 feet square - allow viewers to feel the billowing of imagination that unmoors it from spatial constraints and literal reference points.